Monday, April 20, 2015

It
was an exceptionally well-attended reading. From Milton to Bukowski
is a wide range in poets and the sheer wonder of articulating their
words excited the eleven readers present.

Pamela, Talitha, Sunil, KumKum & Priya

We
had a new reader, Govind Sethunath, come by to try out our group. He
chose safety and read a couple of well-known poems of Shelley which
we enjoyed – one was Ozymandias, the first poem ever that
Priya read in our group, as she recalled.

Priya, Govind, Zakia, Thommo, CJ, Ankush, & Pamela

CJ's
appearance provoked some wide-eyed amazement. So much has he reduced
in girth from constant distance running in Hyderabad (his present
posting) around Hussain Sagar lake, that he has had to acquire a new
wardrobe. But his impish wit continues to surprise us, as it did in
the choice of poem and poet – the incorrigible Charles Bukowski.

KumKum & Priya

We
are glad to have Ankush back; he docked at Kochi port only an hour
before our meeting and raced here on his bicycle from his present
posting aboard INS Kesari (pennant L15), a tank and troop landing
ship.

The
next reading for the novel Diary
of a Nobody
by George and Weedon Grossmith
has been fixed already
for
Fri
May
1,
2015.

We
have an issue about our meeting place
in the Library of the CYC; the authorities of the club want to charge
us Rs 500 per session toward the use of the AC. Thommo will speak to
them, and if they don't agree to exempt us, we'll try to get the Blue
Room at the Cochin Club in Fort Kochi for free.

1.
KumKum

Ezra
Pound ( Oct 30, 1885 – Nov 1, 1972)

He
was born in Hailey, Idaho, to European immigrant parents. Later the
family moved to Pennsylvania. Pound studied in the University of
Pennsylvania at the College of Liberal Arts. He received his MA from
there, and also begun work for a Ph.D. in Literature, but never
completed it. He got a handsome stipend of $500 a month for the PhD
program.

He
was never a student with an one-track mind. Young Pound enjoyed the
company of smart and beautiful women whom he came to know at the
University, and he enjoyed frequent travel to various European cities
even in his student days. Cities of Western Europe and London
held a life-long charm for this American intellectual and dreamer.

He
spent many years as an adult in London, then moved with equal ease to
Paris, and further years were spent in Venice and other cities in Italy. He
died in Venice at the age of 87.

Ezra Pound as an older man

Ezra
Pound was an amazing individual: wherever he lived, he became part of
the intellectual cream of the place. He was legendary in that
respect. He was a friend of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Cummings, Frost,
Harriet Moore, James Joyce, and Hemingway, to name the top few. He
was well read and knew nine languages. His more famous literary
friends recognised his mastery over good writing and the craft of
verse. Many of them requested him to "Blue-Ink" their
works. Eliot, Joyce and Hemingway all admitted Pound's contribution
in improving their novels and poems.

Not
only were writers and the poets among his friends, but he also
befriended famous painters, musicians –- and even the politicians
of his time. He hobnobbed with Mussolini to his discredit.

Ezra
Pound was a complex person. This complexity was apparent in everything
he did. It pervaded his personal life, as well. He was married to
Dorothy Shakespeare, the beautiful daughter of Yeats' one time lover.
Dorothy was part of his life until the end, but she had to suffer his
numerous dalliances. During their time in Paris Pound started a
serious affair with Olga, the daughter of an American industrialist.
Olga was a violinist, rich and possessed of a free spirit. Olga
remained the "other woman" in his long life. Pound had a son by
Dorothy named Omar, and a daughter by Olga, Mary. The Pounds were
always poor, and so Dorothy sent her son to her mother in London
to be brought up. Mary grew up with her mother in France,
Italy and Spain. Olga helped the Pounds often, and she even shared
her apartment with Ezra and Dorothy when they could not afford a
place to stay.

In
1922 Edmund Wilson reviewed Pound's collection titled Poems
1918-21. A sentence from this review remarks on Pound's complex
style: "Pound's poems stood isolated with fragmentary wording
contributing to poems that do not hang together." Perhaps he
started the vogue in modern poetry of words 'not hanging together'!

Here
are 3 poems from his huge collection.

Joe asked, when KumKum finished reading Au Jardin, what it was about. A woman he loves or has loved, said KumKum. In a book of criticism The Poetry of Ezra Pound by Hugh Witemeyer we read that this poem is a riposte to Yeats' poem, The Cap and Bells. The line

The
jester walked in the garden.

is
the opening line of that poem of Yeats, where the jester woos the young lady and as a last gesture offers
his most prized possession, his jester's cap and bells. He sends it
to her and dies – only then does the lady deign to love him in
return. Pound says in
his poem that kind of
chivalric romanticism is not for him, and exclaims

Well,
there's no use your loving me

That
way, Lady;

You
can read about this on p. 102 of the book referred to which can be
searched with the phrase
The jester walked in the garden
at

About
the next poem of Pound, Dance Figure,
there
is
a reference to a Nathat-Ikanaie.
Who is this? KumKum said it
could be Akenathen, a pharaoh
of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt who ruled for 17 years and died
perhaps in 1336 BC or 1334 BC (wikipedia); but it is more likely to
be the name of a girl in ancient Egypt whose name means 'tree at the
river.' Thommo suggested that
it could be a made-up word, even as Minister of State V.K. Singh in the
present government is wont concocting such words as 'presstitutes'. To Joe the diction in the poem was suggestive of
the Song of Songs from
the Bible; so did it seem to Talitha. But there is no discernible
connection to Cana, which in the New Testament is the scene of a
marriage at which Jesus performed the first miracle of his public
life.

KumKum
mentioned that Pound was in demand by great authors for 'blue-lining'
their works, taking his editorial pen to Joyce's Ulysses,
to the Waste Land of
Eliot, and even Hemingway sought him out. All these authors have in
common that they met in Paris, wondrous
Paris, safe harbour for creative spirits.

Talitha
said
an easier, less allusive poem
of Pound is the well-known The River-Merchant's Wife: A
Letter (the poet is Li Bai, or
Li Po as he is also known).
It's a lovely poem, said,
Talitha, and stands on its own. That was a recreation from some loose
translations by Fennellosa. Joe mentioned the caveats of Vikram Seth
in his translation of the Chinese poets Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu in the
volume Three Chinese Poets. Vikram
Seth discusses the translations of Ezra Pound, with his "ignorance
of Chinese and valiant self-indulgence," which he gently
proposes as a "warning of what to shun."

Her
mother was a strong influence, and as the children wandered from
place to place her, their mother read from a trunk full of books. Her
mother was a school teacher, and from having to divorce her husband for
dereliction, lived in straitened circumstances afterwards. They were
three independent-minded sisters. When Edna went to Vassar, an elite
all-women's (at that time) college she continued to write and had
affairs with other women. She was bisexual and open about it. She
dabbled in theatre, and wrote poetry entering a poem called
Renascence in a contest; she did not win, but the second-prize
winner yielded generously to Edna's as the superior work. She got a
sponsor too for her education at Vassar from a lady admirer. She
married but her husband had affairs (as did she) during their long and compatible
married life. Edna was a pacifist during the war. She
won the Robert Frost Medal for her contribution to poetry. You can
read an excellent literary account of her multi-faceted career
(short-story writer, dramatist, and so on) at Poetry Foundation

In
the first poem, a perfect sonnet, Edna uses the sonnet form to
propose the argument that love does not provide for everything, even
for essential things, like 'meat and drink'; then she turns it around
and says people are yet dying for the lack of love. For her the
temptation is

I
might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or
trade the memory of this night for food.

But
she won't:

It
well may be. I do not think I would.

With
Virgil, she would rather yield to love (et nos cedamus amori).

The
second poem (Conscientious Objector) is a pacifist poem. She
was a pacifist and wrote poems pitying war's brutalities during World
War II. Ankush however maintained Edna was not against war in
itself, but scorned the idea of romantic war. The Poetry
Foundation bio above has a long paragraph about her fervent pacifism
of 1933, which was transformed into her writing war propaganda when she
realised that Hitler and Japanese militarism were threatening the
world. Thommo and Sunil referred to WWI starting in the Balkans with
a shot that killed Archduke Ferdinand.

Sunil
advised us to read the third long poem (The Ballad of the Harp
Weaver) on our own. It tells the story of a woman without the
means to clothe or feed her son, but who can give him love.

3.
TalithaDonald
Justice(1925
– 2004)

Donald Justice was born in Miami in 1925. He studied piano and composition
and graduated in English Literature. He studied at Univ of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was among the first to study at the
creative writer's programme in USA, the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He
later returned to teach there and was the mentor of many poets who
came out of the workshop. He was a master of many forms of poetry
(such as the villanelle, the sestina and the ballad), and even tried
a random form (if there is such a thing) known as aleatory poems,
which comes from the Latin word, aleator, for gambler. Such poems are prone to
fragmentation, yet sound complete when they end, said Talitha. Rather
like the average human life, what? You can read the poet's bio
Talitha quoted from at

It
seems he was an exacting teacher and nothing a student wrote ever
held up under his severe gaze. A student lamented, “in less than
ten words he could fashion a question that would blow your knot of
words open like thistledown.”

The
first poem, There is a gold light in certain old paintings, paints
the lovely image of golden light. Orpheus'
tragic loss of Eurydice is described in these words, which
Talitha liked:

the
song went this way: O prolong

Now
the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

CJ
referred to the simple line

It
is like happiness, when we are happy.

and
noted its childlike quality.

Talitha
skipped the next poem and read the one on the Pantoum of the Great
Depression. Pantoum is a Malay verse form consisting of an
indefinite number of quatrains with the second and fourth lines of
each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the following
one. Some of the descriptions are characteristic of the greyness that
descended on lives in the Depression era, but it was a misery that people
kept private although everyone suffered:

It
was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,

And
if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

…

The
Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.

The
repetitiveness induced by the form makes it read like a dirge; form
and content are therefore apposite. Everyone appreciated the poem.
KumKum said the poet crafted it very well. Ankush called it very
'modern'. Talitha remarked on the starkness of the line:

We
gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor

Zakia
liked the image

And
time went by, drawn by slow horses.

and asked what was a villanelle; Talitha, our resident expert on forms, explained it and this is best read at leisure in the wikipedia
reference:

For
my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for
travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

Pamela
liked the lines

Keep
Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving
there is what you’re destined for.

But
don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better
if it lasts for years,

Cavafy
describes
snatches of
the 20-year journey of
Odysseus from Troy, back to his native kingdom, Ithaca, with his
faithful mariners, braving
the dangers from Cyclopses, the race of
one-eyed giant monsters,
and
the Laistrygonians, the giant
cannibals
who destroyed many of his ships with rocks and ate several companions
of his.
When Odysseus
returns (as Joe, Thommo, and CJ remarked) only his old
dog,
Argos,
recognises him, and has
barely enough strength to wag his tail. Penelope, his wife, is busy
keeping at bay suitors. She is the exemplar of the faithful wife.
Incidentally, Ulysses is the name in Roman myths for Odysseus, and
Tennyson's poem, Ulysses,
is also about his return to Itahaca.

Cavafy's
style is direct, almost laconic, but with it he achieves great
wisdom:

Ithaka
gave you the marvelous journey.

Without
her you wouldn't have set out.

You
can see he is a sensual poet too, but in this poem he has no need to
be erotic as he is in other poems. Cavafy circulated his verse among
friends, but did not care to publish much, and privately, if at all.
He therefore died in obscurity, and it was for posterity to discover
him, and his world of fleeting pleasures and relationships. But he
was a serious student of history and civilisations too. His writings
were acclaimed by E.M. Forster.

In
his memoirs A Lie About My Father
he recalls the experience of
being badly
affected by an alcoholic and abusive father. A volume of his verse
called Black Cat Bone
(2011) won the Forward Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. You
can read a review of the collection at

Ankush
likes the way Burnside
uses metaphors and language. Rather than say, 'I am sad', he
communicates it indirectly by the images he uses. In the poem
Disappointment he
seems to be recalling himself as a child wading into
a stream and the water flowing
past in a 'Quink-blue current' and
a fish swimming by.

CJ
said Parker Quink is still
sold as ink in these days of
ball-point pens. In India it is made and marketed by Luxor. On how
Quink
became famous you can read:

It
means a whirring noise, in its onomatopoeic sense, and not any of
those other meanings.

In
Loved and Lost the poet
concludes that

that
love divulged is barely love at all:

only
the slow decay of the second skin

concocted
from the tinnitus of longing.

Whatever
that means; so all those who have been professing their love through
the ages – this poet reveals they have only been busy about derma
care!

In
Amnesia, the third short
poem, Burnside says there is always room for ambiguity in memory. And
the image for that
he uses is snow falling
to obscure the contours of familiar
shapes. People liked the expression

is
one

wide

incognito;

for
the effect of a snow drift. The use of 'precise and random' makes the
reader sit up. These are good impressionist scene captures.

Somebody
called him the poet of American low-life. He was a poet in LA, that
wonderful city to examine the seedy side of America, and wikipedia
reports 'Bukowski embarked on a series of love affairs and one-night
trysts', all of which provided material for his poetry, and his short
stories. Wikipedia also speaks of his 'riotous public poetry readings
and boorish party behaviour', and the epitaph on his tomb: “Don't
Try”, which apparently forbids the aspiring poet from trying to
create poetry, instead he is admonished to wait, and wait, until it comes to you.
Bukowski didn't have to wait around a lot, judging from the thousands
of poems he wrote.

CJ
wondered if the first poem he had chosen by Bukowski was fit for
reading before the gentle ladies of our group. But a chorus of yeas
put paid to his bashfulness and he went ahead with My Groupie.
This
poet is obviously a
performer well used to young women reaching
out and straining to touch
him
on stage. The colloquial meaning of 'take' is
to have your way sexually with a person.
http://www.urbandictionary.com
is most useful on this
score, and you can look up
the meaning of the word 'score' itself.

When
the poem ends one is compelled to agree with the poet

one
can never be sure

whether
it's good poetry or

bad
acid.

Bukowski's
description of Poetry readings
is fortunately different from ours. None of our readers are

still
hoping their genius will be

discovered

It
is
not our own
'thin invisible talent' we
gather to celebrate. Laughter
punctuates our readings, given that no poet or reader, can escape the
ready wit of our
audience to find something
incongruous or
silly in the proceedings.

Bukowski's
experience of the 'poetry holes of America' where people gather to
read their own poetry may be one side of the picture. But isn't it
wonderful that people gather at all for poetry readings, to listen to
each other? Take a look at this picture of people at a bar in lower
Manhattan attending a 'poetry slam'. Do they look sad, or are they rapt?

The audience at KGB Bar in Manhattan listens to recited poetry

The
Prakriti Foundation in Chennai conducts such events too. By the way a
'four rounder' is to boxing what T20 is to cricket, a shortened
version in which the boxers go at each other slam-bang for four
rounds (if both men last) from the word go.

7.
Thommo

Günter
Grass (1927 – 2015)

The
German author died a few days ago on April 12 and appropriately
Thommo chose to read a poem of his, considered controversial when it
was published. Wikipedia states
the facts thus:

On
4 April 2012, Grass's poem "What
Must Be Said" (Was
gesagt werden muss)
was published in several European newspapers. Grass expressed his
concern about the hypocrisy of German military support (the delivery
of a submarine) for an Israel that might use such equipment to launch
nuclear warheads against Iran, which "could wipe out the Iranian
people" ("dass...iranische Volk auslöschen könnte").

And
he hoped that many would demand "that the governments of both
Iran and Israel allow an international authority free and open
inspection of the nuclear potential and capability of both."

In
response, Israel declared him persona non grata in that country.

Thommo
mentioned that originally Grass had owned up early on to being a member of the
Hitler Youth (as was former Pope Benedict XVI)
when he was conscripted
as a boy during WWII. What he took a long time confessing (until 2006 when he wrote a biographical memoir later translated as Peeling the Onion) was that at
age 17 he
had actually volunteered for the Waffen SS, a separate part of the German army who
were responsible for the worst war crimes, including the death camps. Read a review of the book at

What
Must Be Said
is a prose poem of 69 lines in 9 unrhymed stanzas. The
poet
demands that the Iranian
and the Israeli nuclear sites be both put under international
control, and nuclear weapons eliminated. The Western hypocrisy Grass
underscores consists in treating Israeli nuclear weapons as okay, but
Iranian weapons, if they exist at all, as evil. He
excoriates
Germany for abetting the Israeli
nuclear posture of aggression by providing a
submarine
so it could
launch a missile from a mobile site that could
not
be tracked easily or attacked.

The
further hypocrisy (of the West) is to raise a big ruckus about
nuclear proliferation by 'rogue states' while they themselves were
the world's very
FIRST proliferators by supplying clandestinely the means to produce
weapons-grade plutonium to Israel: a reactor from France erected
at Dimona, a site in the Negev desert;
heavy water from Norway via England and later supplied by USA; uranium sourced from the apartheid South African regime; testing conducted in the
Prince Edward Islands (not far from Antarctica)
under S African control); all watched and monitored silently
by
US intelligence and satellites. You
can read muchof this interesting
stuff in
a detailed account at
an
Israeli website

The nuclear reactor which supplied Israel with weapons-grade plutonium for atomic bombs - outside Dimona in the northern Negev desert

Joe
asked Thommo: what is
there so controversial in what Grass stated
in the poem? It is common knowledge that Germany supplied a submarine
and was 'complicit' in providing
a
platform for an
atomic weapon at sea;
that Israel had
nuclear
weapons is
also universally known.Grass'
solution of bringing Iranian and Israeli nuclear sites
under international control as the only way for peace to return to
Israel and Palestine is
an opinion, radical perhaps, but rational and
fair.
Would
Grass have caused as much of a controversy if he had composed it as
a
prose article
for
the same journals, Süddeutsche
Zeitung, La Repubblica and El País?

The
outcry orchestrated by the Israeli lobby worldwide was undoubtedly
because a German of international stature had broken a long-standing
protocol that no German should ever say anything critical of
Israel, given that Germany was responsible for much of
the cruelty
and systematic
killing
of
Jews during the time of
the Third Reich. That taboo being broken was a barrier breached which
infuriated the Israeli
government.
Grass warns in the poem that the charge of anti-semitism is an easy
knee-jerk reaction, but one
that would notstick
against him.

8.
Zakia

Sudeep
Sen (born 1964 )

Zakia
read a poem, quite detailed and descriptive, done by Sudeep Sen for
Leela Samson, the former dancer of the Kalakshetra in Chennai. If
there is a fault in this poem it is the excessive details in the
description, leaving little to the imagination of the reader. It is
a tribute to Leela Samson and talks of her eyelids that 'flit and
flirt.' Priya said of Sudeep Sen that he has a glad eye. He's cute,
added, CJ. We wondered whether Leela had a Samson; apparently not.
You can see her dancing here

Whether
pirouettes are a feature of Bharatnatyam or not, we can't say,
probably not. Priya used a quaint phrase for Leela Samson saying she
is 'not very new' (born 1951 to be precise).

Said
KumKum to Joe

'You're
not very new,'

He
answered encore

'But
neither, my dear, are you!'

Talitha
alerted us to the line

adorns
you and your dance, reminding us of

the
treasure chest that is only

half-exposed

The
treasure chest is her dancer's body the poet is referring to.

9.
Joe

Grey
Gowrie (born 1939)

Joe's
reading consisted of the lyrics of three Fado songs, translated by
the poet, Grey Gowrie, from the Portuguese lyrics written by three different
lyricists named in the text below.

Fado
(from Latin fatum = fate) means destiny and the genre originated in
the 1820s. Wikipedia says “In popular belief, fado is a form of
music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea
or the life of the poor, and infused with a sentiment of resignation,
fatefulness and melancholia.” Popular poets have written verses for
this kind of music, and singers began to adapt the poems of even
literary poets, like Pedro Homem de Mello, to fado music. Composers
supplied the melody. We heard fado in Fort Kochi several years ago
when singers from the University of Coimbra (a group called Alma de
Coimbra) sang in the Bishop's House outdoors in full costume on Jan
29, 2009:

Joe
came to know about Fado music 20 years ago when a singer with a smoky
voice called Cesária Évora from the Cape Verde islands sold a top
selling CD in USA. There are many other famous singers (Amália
Rodrigues, Cristina Branco, Mariza) of fado, female as well as male.

A
word about the poet. Grey Gowrie (the Earl of Gowrie) is a well
connected hereditary peer of the realm, and has been a Tory minister
in the 80s and 90s, and was chairman of the Arts Council and
Sotheby's. He was born in 1939 and at a young age he published his
first book of poems, after working as an assistant to the American
poet, Robert Lowell – that was from a time Gowrie spent teaching at
Harvard after graduating from Oxford, as all British peers do. After
that he fell silent as far as poetry was concerned and woke up only
after after the trauma of a heart transplant and published a new
volume called the Domino Hymn, a sequence of 17 poems in 2005.

The three fado poems (translations of lyrics of the fado songs) are taken from a recent volume of Grey Gowrie in 2013 called The Italian
Visitor. Two of the fado poems below (Vielas De Alfama and Lembrai-te da Nossa Rua?) are followed by links to videos where you can hear the music.

Grey
Gowrie came to write these translations at the suggestion of the
Gulbenkian Foundation Director Andrew Barnett in London when he told
the Director how he enjoyed going to attend the fado music sessions
at O Fado, a Portuguese restaurant in Knightsbridge. The
foundation commissioned 18 poets including Gowrie, to do English
versions of Fado songs, alongside the original. That resulted in a
volume called

Elena
Kuzmina says Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word that
has no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional
state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent
something or a missing lover. It often carries a repressed knowledge
that the object of longing may never return. A stronger form of
saudade may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are
unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone
missing.

Saudade
was once described as "the love that remains" after
someone is gone. It is the recollection of feelings, experiences,
places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, and
well-being – which now triggers the senses and makes one live again
– or feel incomplete forever.

10.
Govid Sethunath

Percy
Shelley (1792 – 1822)

Our
new reader Govind Sethunath chose to read from Shelley. One of the
poems, Ozymandias, was read by Priya when she came first to
attend. It is there in the list of Poets and Poems read at our
blog.

Govind
gave a little family background to Shelley. He married a girl called
Harriet impetuously, after she threatened to commit suicide. Later
after some travels and writing, he met Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin,
daughter of a feminist, and abandoned Harriet to marry the new lady
who became the famous author, Mary Shelley. Read about their complex
relationships and passions at the wiki site

They
led a wonderful life amid a circle of friends including poets like
Byron and Keats. Shelley's generous admiration of Keats is reflected
in his poem Adonais, written as an elegy after Keats died.
Shelley too died young, only a year after Keats, in a boating
accident when his sailboat capsized on the NW coast of Italy, in the
gulf of Spezia between Genoa and Pisa. His body when found was
defaced and bloated and had to be cremated on the beach.

Shelley's Funeral by Fournier (Byron in boots at the right, Leigh Hunt is next to him)

Ozymandias
was an alternative name for King Ramesses II. Wikipedia states that

Shelley
began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the
British Museum's acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of
Ramesses II from the thirteenth-century BC, and some scholars believe
that Shelley was inspired by this.

Shelley's
further inspiration came from an inscription on a statue, "King
of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and
where I lie, let him outdo me in my work." Shelley and his
friend, Horace Smith, competed to write a sonnet based on this and
you can see the two sonnets side by side at

Nothing
can match the grave finality of the last five lines of Shelley's
poem:

'My
name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look
on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing
beside remains. Round the decay

Of
that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The
lone and level sands stretch far away."

This
image could also have been invoked when soldiers pulled down a statue
of Saddam Hussein after the fall of Baghdad in the 2003 Iraq War.
Ankush delivered the trivial bit that this poem was used as the title
of an episode in the TV series called Breaking Bad (which, he
said, means raising hell). See

The
second poem Govind recited was Love's Philosophy. It is an
excellent poem to memorise for youths who have designs on damsels.
Joe said he recalled the last two lines differently and gave out his
version, which is actually the one that appears in the Palgrave
Treasury – from where he got his dose of the romantic poets early.
Thommo guessed it might be just such lines Joe used on KumKum!

Everyone
lauded Govind for his maiden effort.

11.
Priya

John
Milton (1608 – 1674)

Milton's
duet of long poems Il Penseroso (the melancholy man) and
L'Allegro (the happy man) figures in most anthologies of the
last century. The wikipedia entry for L'Allegro notes: “The
poem invokes Mirth and other allegorical figures of joy and
merriment, and extols the active and cheerful life, while depicting a
day in the countryside according to this philosophy.” See